An aubade is a song or poem of lovers parting at dawn. Irony hosts the separation at a time of day when everything has a chance to start over. Billy Collin’s voice searches the caverns of its mind to put everything in its right place.
Who Am I over There?
In the first stanza the voice imagines itself living “across the street” (1). The voice places itself “on the edge of the bed / at 5 o’clock in the morning” (3-4). The juxtaposition of intrapersonal musings and an interpersonal connection with an imagined neighbor is the vehicle for poem. Collins’s effortless language draws the reader onward.
Who’s Light Is On?
The voice’s imagined self is inquisitive and nosy trying to figure out “what the light / was doing on” in the voice’s study (5-6). It is interesting to delve into the notion that the voice is not using the thoughts of its actual neighbor, but itself. Why is the voice peering so deeply into the imagination of its imagined self? Turmoil sets in as the reader notices how plagued the voice must be to get stuck within itself all-alone in the dark. The tone is bleak, yet there has been no mention of a separation, only introspection. Where is the other lover?
A Poem for Your Thoughts
The voice switches directions and begins to create a distance between its imagined self and its true self because it begins to refer to itself as “the man across the street” (12). The voice then becomes oddly self-deprecatory because it points out that its imagined self “sits in the dark because sleep / is his mother and he is one of her many orphans” (15-16). The metaphor delves deeper into despair illustrating loss.
Double Natured
In the fifth stanza the voice harkens back to itself and its state of being. Collins fools with sensations of forlorn modernity: first the reader is subjected to a “high-pitched ringing / of tungsten in the single lightbulb” which is jarring and then the former sensation is replaced with the pleasance of “the rustling of trees” (18-20). The double nature of the cognizance is indicative of the voice that has split itself into two beings.
Further Doubt
The voice continues to inquire as to its “job” resolving that it may be to just “sit as still / as the glass of water on the night table / of the man across the street” (21-23). Is not the voice sitting still, “as still as the photograph of [its] wife in a frame" (24)? The poem’s characters begin to converge into one who is without rest and skeptical of happiness.
Birdcall
The final stanza brings a newfound “reason” for the voice to be awake (26). In the midst of self-doubt, isolation, and darkness the voice hears “the first bird to deliver his call” (25). The sound is at once jarring like the “lightbulb” and pleasant like the “rustling of trees”. The poem converges like the voice and its imagined self to wait patiently “for some reply” (28).
Who Will Respond?
The voice wanted to be “as still as the photograph of [its] wife”, but the stillness has only exacerbated the sorrow. The voice has lost its wife and this solipsistic rumination is its first call in the morning sent out to wait for a response that will never come from someone who will not wake up in the same bed.
 |
